KASHMIR: Unidentified gunmen, dressed as soldiers, shot dead 24 Hindus, including 11 women and two children, in northern India's war-torn Kashmir state early yesterday morning in the biggest-ever strike on the disputed province's minority community.
Police said between eight and 10 armed men crept into Nadimarg village, 33 miles south of the state's summer capital, Srinagar, after midnight, disarmed a group of policemen guarding the area and separated the handful of Hindus from the Muslims.
They were then lined up in front of the lone Hindu temple in the village and shot dead with automatic weapons, after which their killers disappeared into the nearby jungle.
About 50 Hindus had stayed on in the Muslim-dominated village after more than 300,000 Hindus, living in Kashmir for centuries, fled the province in 1990 after Islamic militant groups fighting the Indian government for independence began targeting them.
Yesterday's attack came amid efforts by the newly elected state government to bring the Hindus back to India's only Muslim-majority state alongside a federal government initiative that opened talks with major Kashmiri separatist groups earlier this month to resolve the vexatious 56-year dispute.
"It [the attack\] was aimed at countering the government's move to try and get the Hindus to return," Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad, whose Congress party is a partner in the state's new coalition administration, said.
"Around midnight a group of men in army uniform, pretending to be soldiers, banged on our doors and dragged us outside," said Mr Ramesh Kumar, a 28-year-old Hindu, who along with a few others managed to escape the gunmen under cover of darkness. He, however, lost his father in the shooting.
After snatching jewellery from the women, the gunmen lined up the Hindus and fired at them at point-blank range. "This is the price we have had to pay for staying back," said Mr Chunni Lal (60), who was shot in the leg. He confirmed he had lost his wife.
By early morning more than 2,000 wailing mourners beat their chests as relatives and friends streamed into Nadimarg from surrounding villages, walking past bloodstained earth, blood-smeared shoes and slippers strewn outside the temple to the shroud-covered bodies awaiting cremation.
A regimental priest attached to a local army unit presided over the funeral rites later in the day. "This is a blot, a scar on the state. They are targeting the minuscule minority that stayed behind for the love of their land," the state's Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed said.
"We will not spare them. We will mobilise the people of Kashmir against these killers," he declared.
The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, summoned a meeting of his top security advisers, while his deputy, Mr Lal Krishna Advani, is planning on visiting the site of the attack today. "The whole situation is under review, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to meet such situations," the Foreign Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, told reporters.
The massacre came a day after unidentified gunmen assassinated an Islamic guerrilla leader who was expelled from Kashmir's largest rebel group, reportedly for holding secret talks with the Indian government.